Whether you're a teacher, a parent, or just someone with a big family, you know how difficult it can be to keep a room full of kids quiet for any amount of time.

One trick I've used is offering to time how long kids can stay quiet. For reasons I don't understand, kids love it when something is being timed. But that only work a few times at the most, so it's good to have as many other tricks on hand as possible. That's why I was fascinated to learn there are multiple websites that use the microphone on your laptop to motivate kids to be quiet. Some put children's curiosity to work, having animated characters show up if the group is quiet for long enough. Others combine animation with good old-fashioned timers.

Here are a few you can check out—all of them are completely free and don't require anything more than your browser.

Silent Forest: Animals emerge if the room is quiet

Credit: Justin Pot

Silent Forest shows a simple animated forest with a volume indicator. Stay silent for a bit and a cat shows up. A bit longer and a bear shows up. Who else might join? There's only one way to find out. Make too much noise, though, and you'll scare the animals, meaning you have to start over if you ever want to see everyone. The idea is that the kids will be curious to see which animals will show up next and keep quiet—and, ideally, pressure each other into staying quiet.

Bouncy Balls: Noise will disrupt the balls

Credit: Justin Pot

Bouncy Balls fills your screen with balls—options include colored balls, emojis, numbered balls, eyeballs, and even bubbles. The balls are constantly vibrating, threatening to explode with a bit of noise—which they do. There's a risk of this backfiring—it's sincerely very fun to see the balls bounce—which you can mitigate by enabling a shushing or beeping sound after any violation.

Classroom Zen: Don't interrupt Ruby or Milo

Credit: Justin Pot

Classroom Zen offers a few different tools for keeping the room quiet. Two feature Ruby, a cartoon who is meditating in either the mountains or the desert. If the room gets too loud, her eyes will start opening—keep going and she'll ask the room to be quiet. Another features Milo, a three-eyed monster who is trying to sleep.

The secret sauce here, though, is the timer at the top of the screen. This means you can tell the kids they need to be quiet for a certain amount of time and have a timer to enforce that.

I get really carsick if I try to read in a moving vehicle. And there's a reason for that: my eyes and my sense of movement are out of sync.

At least, that's according to the CDC, which states that motion sickness, "happens when the movement you see is different from what your inner ear senses." Your inner ear is a sack of fluid that moves when you do, giving you an innate sense of movement. If you're in a car and watching the horizon, your senses are aligned. But if you're looking at your phone, your senses are confusing each other. It's similar to the reason VR games make some people feel sick.

The free Android app KineStop aims to help. The application overlays a transparent horizon, and a number of transparent dots, across your entire screen. The accelerometer on your phone is used to move these reference points as your phone moves, helping to reduce the conflict between your eyes and your inner ear. You can turn the feature on manually in the application or, if you prefer, you can set it up to turn on automatically when you're in a moving car.

I tried it out, wondering if it would help with my carsickness, and it did—surprisingly well. Normally I can't read for more than a few minutes without feeling sick, but the KineStop app helped me do so for longer, without discomfort. I'm still not going to be able to read novels during a long road trip, mind you, but I can look up the next restaurant on a road trip without vomiting, and I call that a win.

Credit: Justin Pot

KineStop is totally free, though there's a $3.50 pro version that adds themed overlays, including one that makes it look like your phone is a half-empty beer. It's great to support a developer, but I also think the free version will work fine for most everyone.

Using keyboard shortcuts is a lot faster than clicking around in the menus, but only after you learn them. That's the hard part.

You could look up the documentation for the application or explore the menu bar—but if you're on a Mac, you could also just install KeyClu. This free application shows an overlay with all the keyboard shortcuts for the currently open Mac application, which is very useful for anyone trying to become a more keyboard-savvy computer user.

To get started, install the application. Then, you'll need to choose a trigger key (basically one of the modifier keys on your keyboard). By default, you will tap the key twice and hold on the second tap to trigger the overlay, but you can optionally set the application to simply press and hold the key if you prefer. I opted to press and hold Command.

After that, you'll be asked to enable permissions so KeyClu can access the keyboard shortcuts for your applications. Then you can start using the application. I tend to ignore the application until I wonder whether a keyboard shortcut for a particular function exists. I trigger the application, look through the list of keyboard shortcuts, and see what's available. When I let go of the trigger key, the window disappears.

This default floating window is useful, but you might want a window listing shortcuts to stay open even when you let go of the trigger. That's where the persistent panel comes in. This window, which you can trigger using the menu bar, stays open and always shows a list of keyboard shortcuts for the currently active application. You can add a separate keyboard shortcut for this window in the settings, if you like.

Credit: Justin Pot

If you dig around in KeyClu's settings, you can configure the layout of both the pop-up and persistent panels, changing the size of the windows, how many columns shortcuts are sorted into, and which display the panels show up on.

Credit: Justin Pot

It's a simple piece of software, but it's completely free and can help you get better at using your computer. And if you're reading Lifehacker, that's probably something you want. Speaking of keyboard shortcuts: here are a few keyboard shortcuts you should know. You can also check out our guide to creating your own macOS keyboard shortcuts.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Safari is better than Chrome. Apple's default browser runs faster, is less cluttered, offers privacy features Google would never contemplate, and doesn't try to cram AI down your throat.

But that doesn't mean Safari is perfect. Like all browsers, it works better if you install the right extensions. Here are a few I've found in the past year or so that make the best browser even better.

Block ads and other clutter

Credit: Justin Pot

The internet is increasingly useless without a good ad blocker, and the best ad blocker for Safari—which works on both macOS and mobile devices—is wBlock. This extension uses the built-in ad blocking functionality offered by Safari, which is much faster than the workarounds that extensions on browsers like Chrome need to use. It also supports a number of popular blocklists, with automatic updating. Or you can go even further and install Userscripts. Best of all, it's completely free. Try it out if you're not happy with your current ad blocker.

Add a dark mode to sites that don't have one

Credit: Justin Pot

We can argue endlessly about whether dark or light mode are better (and I have), but we can all agree it's annoying to be using dark mode only for the websites you're browsing to be white as snow. That's where Noir comes in. This extension forces Dark Mode in Safari on websites that otherwise don't offer the feature. It's a must-have for dark mode enthusiasts.

Automatically open picture in picture when you switch tabs

Safari, on mobile, will keep playing videos using picture-in-picture mode if you switch to another application or tab. The desktop version of Safari doesn't do this, which is a shame. Autopip is a Safari extension for Mac that adds this feature. The result: you can keep watching a video in the background while you're working in another tab or application. It's perfect if you're the sort of person who leaves a video playing while you're working on something else.

Quickly copy the URL for the current site

Credit: Justin Pot

Arc, the browser, is dead, and if I'm honest I only miss one feature: the ability to copy the URL of the current website using the keyboard shortcut Command-Shift-C. Yes, it's a very specific thing to miss, but I can't overstate how much of a habit this became for me. And I can keep the habit thanks to Supercopy, a Safari extension that adds the keyboard shortcut to Safari. Yes: that's all it does. I use it dozens of times every day, though, so for me it's well worth keeping around.

Filter Reddit to be less rage inducing

Credit: Pranay Parab

I'd love it if I spent less time on Reddit and I'm sure I'm not alone. The problem: there's a mix of useful and rage-inducing stuff on that website. The good news is Protego lets you filter Reddit to be less infuriating. The idea is to pick a few subreddits you know, in your heart of hearts, you shouldn't be looking at. Do that and you'll be able to use Reddit without ending up down rabbit holes of rage and disgust. You can also filter out posts using keywords and hide promoted content. Trust me: you'll be happier.

Want to block ads on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? wBlock is quickly becoming my favorite solution: it's free, open source, fast, and customizable.

Ad blocking is in a weird place. Google, the company that makes more money from advertising than any other on Earth, is actively working to make ad blockers worse on Chrome while it also makes it harder to block ads on YouTube. Basically, it's a good time to not use Chrome.

So it's nice that Apple users have another choice: Safari. And, as luck would have it, Safari has an extremely efficient API for ad blocking built right in. The ad blocker wBlock uses this, and the result is ads are blocked in a way that doesn't slow down your browsing.

I wrote a few months ago about uBlock Origin for Safari, which doesn't use Apple's native blocking feature. I enjoyed how effective that application was at blocking ads, but over time I've found it does impact the performance of my browser a little. After setting up wBlock, everything feels snappy.

You can install wBlock from the App Store on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. After doing so, you can choose which filter lists you want to use. Several are offered, or you can just stick with the defaults.

Credit: Justin Pot

You will also be asked if you want to enable any userscripts. The ones offered bring back YouTube's old interface and bypass paywalls. You can also install custom userscripts, if you want, meaning you won't need a separate application for that functionality.

After that, you'll need to open Safari, head to the settings, and turn on all the wBlock entries you see on the extensions page. Do that and you should be able to browse the web without any ads.

If you're curious about how this extension works and how it compares to other Safari ad blockers, I recommend checking out the documentation on Github—it goes over how this tool works and how it differs from other applications. I also encourage you to think about the pros and cons of blocking ads overall.

Back in the Windows XP days, when the only search functionality was a cartoon dog in the sidebar of Windows Explorer (not a joke), Google released Google Desktop. If you installed the application, you could search the files on your computer the same way you could search the web. The application made finding your own documents quick—as a small town reporter in northern Alberta, I constantly used this service to dig through my old notes and previous articles.

The service was shut down in 2011, announced via a blog post, which stated that the feature was no longer necessary in the cloud storage era. And that was the end of Google offering to search files on your computer—until now. Back in September, Google announced an experimental Windows-only application named "Google App for Windows" that, among other things, searches the files on your computer.

Nostalgic person that I am, I couldn't help but wonder: was this going to be similar to the retro offering? So I gave it a shot. The installation requires opting in to an "experiment" using your Google account, then downloading and installing an application. After that, you can bring up a search by using the keyboard shortcut Alt+Space, which brings up a search bar. You can use this to search for files on your computer, your Google Drive, and information on the web.

The actual file search doesn't seem particularly sophisticated. While the retro Google Desktop could search the contents of files, the Google App for Windows seems to mostly only be aware of file names. That's disappointing—I liked being able to figure out which files I mentioned particular names, or try to find the source of a sentence I remember writing. This local search functionality honestly isn't much better than the search that comes with Windows.

What this new app can do, though, is search your Google Drive. I was able to quickly find and open files I'd created in Google Docs, then open them in one click. The ability to search these cloud docs alongside my local ones in one place is a decent reason to give this application a chance.

Credit: Justin Pot

And there are also a few web-based features. If there are no files that match your search, you'll see Google search results—select any of those and you'll see an AI-generated blurb answering your question. If you'd prefer traditional Google search results, you can get those instead—just turn off "AI mode" by clicking your profile picture and turning off the AI Mode toggle.

Finally, this application can be used to take a screenshot of your computer and answer questions related to it. For example, I took a snap of my desktop wallpaper—a photo my wife took in New Zealand—and got an accurate description of the location.

Credit: Justin Pot

The feature is similar to those offered by the desktop application of ChatGPT and Claude, just powered by Google's AI instead of those tools. I'm not sure I'd find myself using this regularly, but it's an interesting idea.

The Google App for Windows, sadly, isn't a resurrection of the long-dead Google Desktop, but it is an interesting tool that combines a simple local file search with results from your Google Drive and the web. It's worth playing around with if you're a dedicated Google user who still stores a lot of files on their computer.